When Do Babies Finally Start Sleeping On Their Own?

When do babies finally start sleeping on their own? When to shift babies to their own room? Now those are real questions. Taking care of babies is a lot of work and it’s an endless task during the initial years. They require a lot of love, affection and constant attention.

Thus, they require a lot of your time. And this continues till they make their initial strides towards independence. With reference to sleep-independence, it’s a two-step process:

Step One

shifting your baby to its own room.

Step Two

teach your baby to sleep on its own.

The general trend dictates that a baby should sleep in their parents’ room for the first 6-10 weeks. In fact, it’s quite important that the baby sleeps in the same room initially as by doing so parents find it easy to check-up on the baby.

But, there’s no hard and fast rule as to when to shift a baby to their own room. As parents, it’s your decision to make based on your comfort level. The quicker you do it, the quicker the baby learns to settle itself on its own.

Shifting a baby to its own room doesn’t necessarily mean that the baby can finally start sleeping on its own. No, that’s not how it works. It does take a while for your baby to finally start sleeping on their own automatically.

If you want to quicken up the process, you can teach your baby to do so. Teaching babies is also not easy. It takes quite an effort to teach them something. Therefore, don’t expect results overnight. It can take a couple of months for your teachings to kick in.

Here are some things that you can do as parents to teach your babies to sleep on their own:

1. During the initial years, babies will only sleep in the comfort of someone’s arms.

They don’t like to be put down and will not sleep when put down in their crib. So, first you should put your baby to sleep. Then, you carefully put him/her down in their crib. Now, this is the teaching part and it will take some courage on the part of the parents: wake them up. Obviously, for the first 50 attempts or so, your baby won’t go back to sleep on their own. But, gradually, things will change.

2. Some babies will only fall asleep if they have something to suck on.

Slowly and steadily try breaking off this association that they have created between sleep and sucking. A trick to break this association is to rock them to sleep. Then, once they get adjusted to the rocking, it’s important to break that association as well. To do so, try to rock them into a semi-asleep state, all of a sudden stop rocking and just sit still. Initially, they may throw a tantrum and that’s when you start rocking them again. Keep on repeating this process until they learn to sleep in your arms when they are stationary.

Those are just a few simple teaching hacks. Hopefully, you can apply them to your benefit.

Always remember, on the day your baby starts sleeping on their own, you will find yourself with an awful lot of time that you previously did not have and craved. Use this time wisely to spoil yourself!